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After more than seven months out of work, the degree to which I can afford anything above the bottom rung of Maslow has become truly minimal, but as soon as I discovered Quinquis' eor (2025), a shape-shiftingly electronic, primarily Breton-language album of mermaids and the sea, I leapt for it like it was mackerel. I heard first the all-night love-churn of "Morwreg" (2024), but the irresistible drag sirens of "Dec'h" (2025) sealed the deal.
The copy of Amy Krouse Rosenthal and Tom Lichtenheld's Duck! Rabbit! (2009) which I sent my godchild for his first solstice was familially referred to for years as Baby's First Wittgenstein. I have no idea what Wittgenstein would have made of this cartoon, but I'm impressed.
I am not sure that I am much more than physically extant at the minute. I am clearing the refrigerator and the countertops. I am absorbing as much sunlight as I sleeplessly can. Yesterday kicked off with a doctor's appointment that was too early in the morning to be as unhelpful as it was and only dropped the bar from there, so this afternoon I made sure to secure a half-dozen donuts from the reliable Lyndell's and eat a jam-filled one as soon as I had finished walking home. The neighborhood smelled like alternating drifts of lilac and mulch. I have had the same headache since the weekend and am hoping it is related to the sexing of the trees. The nine o'clock advent of leafblowers to our block was inhumane.Current Music: Quinquis, "Dec'h"
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Human paleontologists have the professional opportunity of a lifetime... but there's a catch.
Bones of the Earth by Michael Swanwick
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In my defence, most of 2026 so far has been spent dealing with incapacitating levels of fatigue, which might finally be getting better (and that needs to be a separate post).
But the major problem is that I wanted to re-read Cascade, the first book in the trilogy, before starting Blight.
And while I loved Cascade -- here is my rave from way back when -- it produces an overwhelming sense of dread in me, even more than it did so on first read, because it captures, with remarkable precision and effectiveness, the sense of living in a liberal democracy that is teetering on the edge of ceasing to be one, and the stomach-dropping sensation when things begin moving unspeakably fast.
It's a very good book, but -- you see the problem.
Anyway, in recent weeks I finally got myself to re-read Cascade, and then I tore through Blight in a few days. Weirdly, I found it a much less difficult read because it's (both politically and environmentally) a post-apocalyptic novel, in which some kind of fightback is beginning.
Anyway it's fucking fantastic, without any of the common middle-book-of-a-trilogy doldrums. A really spectacular and unique mixture of wild magic, cosmic horror, and organizing for revolution, the last written with gritty specificity. The author is dead and all that, I don't know what's firsthand knowledge and what's research, but this is a book that (for example) writes with deep credibility about what it feels like to be in a crowd being tear-gassed.
As well as being a very good book, it also feels it's maybe a psychologically useful book to read right now.
I would like to do a proper write-up but I still have no idea what my energy's going to be doing day to day, so in the meantime here's a hype post, and if you want a review here's ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) james_davis_nicoll's:
https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/land-of-hope
ETA: Also it's on the Aurora Award shortlist for Best Novel:
https://www.csffa.ca/awards-information/current-ballot/
Ob!disclaimer that the author is an internet acquaintance, but I do in fact love the book.
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Nine complete .PDF graphic albums of the Atomic Robo comic series from Tesladyne LLC, plus the 2014 Atomic Robo RPG tabletop roleplaying game from Evil Hat Productions.
Bundle of Holding: Atomic Robo (from 2021)
Eight more albums of Robo's continuing adventures for an unbeatable bargain price.
Bundle of Holding: Atomic Robo New Era
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When it comes to governing a generation ship, do you prefer the Watsonian or Doylist strategy?
Two Plot-Friendly Approaches to Generation Ships
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Just as I was closing my house manager shift last night, an important door lost an integral part. So, I was late getting home.
Today, get in, door not fixed. I get to make sure it is used judiciously.
During the early part of the evening shift, someone on campus, concerned that there was someone on campus pretending to be a cop, decided that the best course of action was to dress entirely in black, including mask, then approach random people to warn them there was a fake cop on campus. This did not instill calm but the campus cops dealt with it.
As I was waiting to go home, I thought I could smell skunk. Asked my HM about it. It seems someone managed to anger the local skunk enough to get sprayed. Not me!
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A crop blight offers the British a chance to apply to the UK the same pragmatic measures they used during famines in Ireland and Bengal.
The Death of Grass by John Christopher
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And today my physical health went through the floor and my mood with it, but I hadn't known that boglands were permeating pop culture to the point of salt marsh gastronomy, biofictional art, and peat-distressed fashion. What a great time it would be for a proper home release of Michael Almereyda's The Eternal (1998). Have some further Rabbitology.Current Music: Rabbitology, "Magnanimity (Bigger Man)"
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Six works new to me. Three are SF, two fantasy and Fiyah is a mix. At least two of the novels are series. Interesting that SF is such a large fraction. Is SF making a comeback?
Books Received, May 2 — May 8
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 43 Which of these look interesting?
View AnswersIf We Cannot Go at the Speed of Light by Kim Cho-yeop (April 2026)
24 (55.8%) The Republic of Memory by Mahmud el Sayed (May 2026)
22 (51.2%) Mortal Things by Marie Lu (October 2026)
4 (9.3%) Maker of Gods by Maria Z. Medina (October 2026)
1 (2.3%) Forged in FIYAH: Celebrating Ten Years of Black Speculative Fiction edited by Davaun Sanders (September 2026)
18 (41.9%) This Crimson Ruin by Rebecca Thorne (December 2026)
5 (11.6%) Some other option (see comments)
2 (4.7%) Cats!
33 (76.7%)
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Important things:
* Just as you should not read The Fortunate Fall if you want a romantic Happily Ever After, you should not read What We Are Seeking if you want a book which neatly ties up all its plot threads.
It's not quite in the same league of non-resolution as Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand (my beloved), but.
Assorted important things happen; the initial situation is radically changed; key decisions are made and alliances are formed. How it will play out is something that will clearly evolve over subsequent years and decades, but the book chooses to leave it at that moment of resolve rather than resolution, with the crucial shifts being internal and interpersonal.
* As an author, Cameron Reed may be the most "not aromantic but she believes in their beliefs" I've ever encountered.
Romantic love is a very real thing in her work, but it doesn't sway the moral or narrative universe of her novels in the way we're trained to expect (and the presence of an explicitly aro character in What We Are Seeking is not accidental).
I love this SO FUCKING MUCH.
* John Maraintha and Iren and Laura and Suddharma and Vo and Pirro and Blue Green.
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I had a rough night and ran around less during the day than previously, but I did take a couple of pictures in the cold late afternoon.
( We hoped for something more. )
Not having dreamed memorably for months, I was amused that last night I was apparently trying to compose a journal post describing a pre-dawn view of the river which presented itself as the Charles, although in waking life it is not crossed with any rope bridges that I know about, nor have I ever seen a market running down its banks to the water. Then I was distracted by discovering the existence of living root bridges. I had never seen anything like them in a non-secondary world. I love that they are not a historical technology.Current Music: Jim Ghedi, "Wasteland"
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Shin Haewon's family falls far short of haughty aristocrat Yu Seojun's very reasonable standards, as he is gracious enough to explain to Haewon. How cruel that fate compels extended proximity between Haewon and Seojun.
Behind Five Willows by June Hur
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Leaving the jewelry store this afternoon with a couple of options for repairing the clasp on my necklace which has finally broken down beyond my abilities with needle-nose pliers, I got back into the car just in time to catch an interview with a geophysicist that not only tipped me off to the 1859 Carrington Event which sounds like the science fiction of its day with its spark-throwing wireless sets and tropically lapped auroras and telegraphers communicating through atmospheric influence alone, it introduced me to the Pangaean block of the Piedmont Resistor which seems to lie beneath most of the Eastern Seaboard, just one more piece of deep—two hundred million years down to the mantle—strangeness underfoot. I may never have heard of the United States Magnetotelluric Array and I understand its utility to the fragile electrical grids we have made to stand between the crochets of solar flares and the conductivity of the earth, but in a country that preserved any care for knowledge its map of melted, sutured, fractured time would be its own payoff. I love how much is banked and shifting beneath the surfaces we interact with, from earth and sea to the structures of the universe. I have missed so many meteor showers this year.Current Music: Pylon Reenactment Society, "Compression"
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Seen in email:
(QWOP)
Free League Announces Legends of Stormbringer RPG Based On Dragonbane Mechanics
Elric returns to the tabletop in an officially licensed RPG powered by the award-winning Dragonbane system
Hello!
Today, we are thrilled to announce Legends of Stormbringer, a new officially licensed tabletop roleplaying game based on the iconic fantasy works of Michael Moorcock, planned for release in 2027.
Legends of Stormbringer will carry you into the Young Kingdoms – a world of dying empires, warring gods, and doomed heroes – and bring Moorcock’s richly imagined setting to the tabletop using rules mechanics based on our award-winning Dragonbane RPG. The game will feature the same accessible, dynamic, and deadly approach that has made Dragonbane one of our most celebrated titles.
Returning to the Young Kingdoms as setting writer is Richard Watts, whose work on previous Stormbringer RPGs helped define how generations of roleplayers have experienced Moorcock’s world.
“This has been in the works for several months and we’re thrilled to finally share the news,” said Tomas Härenstam, CEO of Free League Publishing. “We are honored to bring Elric and the Young Kingdoms to the tabletop once more.”
Further details – including crowdfunding plans and additional creative team announcements – will be revealed at a later date.
Seen online:
Goodman Games secures official Elric of Melniboné license for 2027 release
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Humans discover ancient and extremely enigmatic alien relics around the Solar System. On inventing plot-enabling As Fast As Light starships (PEAFAL), humans determine pretty much any system old enough has relics from the Whoever They Were (WTW). The WTW showeed up in the early Proterozoic, did their thing for 300 million years--although not on Earth, as far as anyoe can tell--and then vanished seemingly overnight for reasons that at as yet unclear.
They seem to have been interested in smaller terrestrial worlds, many of which now have life forms whose last common ancestor was six billion years ago. So probably they were xenoforming worlds? But apparently only barren worlds, for some reason. Also, if they used the PEAFAL drive, there's absolutely no evidence of it.
Age is one reason why the WTW are very enigmatic. 2.5 billion years of radiation and micrometeorites has turned all their artificial stuff into scrap. Sometimes, into subtle chemical traces in regolith. Nobody has ever reverse-engineered WTW relics into something novel to us. In fact, nobody is sure what the WTW even looked like (there are a couple of candidate remains of things that might have had big brain analogues). So, they make a nice Rorschach test for scientists to project their issues onto.
Added later:
Opinions on the WTW vary from "they were nigh-gods" to "they weren't actually intelligent at all" to "they are a Satanic plot."
PEAFAL ships interact with the interstellar medium (ISM) in ways that piss off astronomers specializing in the ISM. PEAFAL wakes could be detected at galactic distance but no non-human wakes are visible. The deal with the ISM means the longer the journey, the more likely it terminates in an energetic event somewhere in deep space. Effectively, this means there's a 1% chance per light year traversed of an unplanned terminal energetic event, which can be reduced somewhat by sending ships in pairs: one (presumably automated) trail blazer and one survivor. This is just annoying for robot probes but is an inhibiting factor for crewed starship recruitment.
PEAFAL ships are sufficiently expensive nobody builds huge ones. As well, nobody knows how to make closed cycle life support systems (LSS): the longest anyone has gone before an isolated ISS fell over and died is 20 years. Efforts to establish colonies on other planets have been very educational.
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I don't want to make any claims for stamina in case tomorrow when I have an appointment I can't leave the house, but for months it has reliably exhausted me to walk around my own neighborhood and after two days out and about I did spend most of this one curled up, but I also left the house in the midafternoon to acquire a plate of baba dip from Noor because I was jonesing for eggplant and later walked back out on a fish-oriented supermarket run in the thickening rain. I stayed an extra hour at my desk because Hestia was in full Llyan mode, swattily objecting when I ceased from petting her as she purred like a turbine underneath the mermaid lamp. The evening's bedmaking was similarly delayed by her commandeering of the clean laundry with her precise and possessively kneading small paws. It does feel like a change that I am not utterly wiped out by household chores. Now if my brain would just decide to rejoin the party. In that vague direction, I am continuing to enjoy Apple TV's Widow's Bay (2026–) which delighted me beyond measure this week not even by featuring a sea hag who explodes when spear-gunned into tide-flat brine—I treasured a Magic card along those lines—but by having shot a scene at Half Moon Beach in Gloucester. I recognized it from its boulders of Cape Ann granite: I have climbed over their tectonic jumble and dozed on them and been photographed on them by spatch, the sticky basement rock of my local microcontinent. I am not used to fictitious islands confected out of coasts I know. It makes me want to visit them. In the meantime I read about the doused and sunken chain of the New England Seamounts.Current Music: Pylon Reenactment Society, "Messenger"
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When a teen schoolgirl stumbles over a classmate's most closely held secret, there is only one course of action open to him.
My Dress-Up Darling, volume 1 by Shinichi Fukuda
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Counting by months, rushthatspeaks and I have been together for fifteen and a half years and married for five and a half and missed any formal celebration of our last anniversary because I was on my way to a hospitalization and so when we found ourselves this afternoon at Castle Island where an absurdly stiff breeze was scooting parasailers like hi-vis velella all over Pleasure Bay, the most natural thing when we tired of walking a wind tunnel around the faience-glinting waves was to pursue a meal on the brick-backed patio of our traditional anniversary restaurant, South Boston's ten-year-old Venetian-style bacaro SRV. We found street parking right around the corner. We ordered a smattering of cicchetti—the never-bettered polpette in their velvet of red sauce, the squid-black crostini topped with salt tufts of baccalà, a translucent dab of quince atop a sweetly plush mouthful of ricotta and salumi, an astonishing smear of uni and oyster butter sharpened with mignonette, plus a kitchen gift of lightly crisped eggplant—and a lambent scallop crudo dressed like the jeweled sea with tiny cubes of astringent kiwi and creamy pistachio and torn fresh mint, served on a shell I would have kept if it had come from a beach and not a restaurant I wanted to let me back through its doors ever again. Even the foccacia was bouncy, salt-skinned, assertive enough to eat even without wiping out the bright tomato sauce left over from the eggplant. My amaro mocktail was as darkly herbal as if it could have gotten me high and Rush-That-Speaks' Salt of the Earth was a tongue-spinning concoction of mezcal, fennel, and absinthe that should not have been able to taste so much like green brine. We wrote them an appreciative note and promised to return before autumn, declining their non-negligible roster of desserts in favor of checking out Uncommon Ice Cream up the street, which had not existed the last time we ate at SRV. Rush got the strawberry which really meant its cinnamon toast crunch swirl and I had the savorily flecked rosemary honeycomb. It had been actual ages since I just walked into a restaurant for an affordably luxurious meal with someone I loved, as in the pre-glacial world I could inhabit more or less safely. The two-hour free space on Mass. Ave. was just a present from the parking gods.
 Current Music: Jim Ghedi, "The Seasons"
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